Views and analysis of Chinese politics and policy from inside China, outside the Beijing and Shanghai beltways

Saturday, 28 May 2016

Not King For A Day, But Party Secretary For A Week

For all of the attention observers have paid to efforts by
Beijing to impose political discipline on Communist party members—from fighting graft to demanding
loyalty in the ranks—local efforts by cadres to address local problems have
received little attention.

Historically, cadres and government officials
usually have three choices--at least where local problems are concerned.

The first choice is to simply abide by what
Beijing wants—especially when Beijing wants all lower-levels to go along with a
campaign that the leadership initiated. Such is the ongoing anticorruption crusade; it was also the case with a crackdown on religious cults, and other draconian campaigns that are really designed
to centralize authority and to remind cadres to take orders instead of initiative.

The second avenue is for cadres to apply
generally what the central government commands, but interpret the directive in
light of local conditions. That approach sometimes meets with approval, if the decree
from above empowers local officials to go along with a general effort to reform
existing practices in some way and when Beijing isn’t too focused on ways and means.
In other words, a measure of decentralization is allowed, to make sure that
even if the local methods adopted might be different from intended, the end-result is
what Beijing has ordered. So an edict to reduce student unemployment might
involve sending graduates out to assist with a harvest where earlier that event was
the responsibility of farmers solely. Quotas issued to local levels for a
certain number of criminal suspects to be apprehended is another example—or, in
an earlier time, identifying counter-revolutionaries or Rightists. There's nominal agreement, and it's often about numbers.

The third avenue is what a few districts in
Nanjing are doing now:taking a slogan
or two appearing in Beijing’s playbook and being innovative in interpreting and
implementing particular catchwords—not to please the central leadership per se
but to seek to solve real problems as Nanjing officials see them. And because daily problems need solving.

Party media has often highlighted what they
refer to as “the
last kilometer problem” [最后一公里问题] –the inability (or unwillingness) of
cadres to connect with the masses, especially those who are not urban dwellers
or exist on the margins of society, geographically or otherwise. Officials have been too focused on economic development, personal promotion, impressing visiting leaders from higher echelons--all the while, streets go unbuilt or unpaved, sewer systems and water infrastructure left to crumble, and economic development itself creates a whole host of problems (often environmental) that are simply treated as the unavoidable social fallout of local progress.For a number of years, Beijing’s response was to push cadres to get out to the urban outskirts or the countryside to
visit residents who simply weren’t responding to its campaigns and having them explained. Various
experiments, including
“pocket cadres”, were tried without much result, in large part because
there wasn’t much follow-up—part of the problem of the “policy as faucet”
approach in China, turn something on and then turn that something off. Experiments might have been innovate, but they ended up being unsupported and therefore unsustainable.

Nanjing’s current effort is from the bottom-up: actually, from
the grassroots to the grassroots.It’s
not explaining directives so much as espousing care and concern for residents, and identifying problems that escaped attention. Of
course, the sincerity part of the mission is part of the portfolio of Chinese leaders on inspection tours, such
as the
one by Party Chairman Xi Jinping to Heilongjiang recently. But the experiments in Nanjing are
local, neighbor-to-neighbor efforts, conducted by so-called
“One Week Secretaries”:These are older
members in the party ranks, some of them retired, who rotate assignments and
reach out to villagers to let them know that the Communist party is interested
in their welfare, and wants to help solve problems.

As
described by local party media in Jiangsu, the approach has been a
straightforward one that began in October 2015. For example, the Organization Department in
the Qixia district of Nanjing assigned 39 party members to participate in the
program, divided into groups of three people, with a term assignment of one
week. (That number has recently grown to 104 cadres.) These “One Week Secretaries” meet with villagers every morning, then
follow up with inspectors in these same villagers to hear of their challenges
and determine the correspondence between complaints heard earlier in the day to
problems that village officials identified.An additional cadre was often assigned as a floating troubleshooter, someone
who “could intervene more quickly, to deal with a specific problem” of pressing
importance--something that could be solved and needed to be.

One party member, surnamed Chen and 66 years
old, said that, in a village of 3700 people on the Dongjiang River in the
district, he discovered problems: “There was garbage everywhere and the
traffic situation caused great inconvenience.” After studying the situation,
according to the account in Nanjing Daily,
Chen was able to get money to repair and reposition the roads, reinforce the
bridges, and construct roadside parking spaces to ease the traffic flow.Chen wasn't from Beijing, but from the area. He wasn't freelancing, nor was he using backchannels. Chen had time and clout, as well as an assigned responsibility.

Nor were these one-off efforts, according to
the account.Each of the “One Week
Secretaries” was “required to write a diary to record daily work and establish a
ledger to facilitate inquiries.” There was a bulletin board posted in the
village to record every week the tasks assigned and to track the progress
made.Villagers could then use that
information to go directly to the village committee to follow up, and the
committee in turn was empowered to enlist hold the villagers themselves accountable,
to participate in the solving of their own local problems.

Apart from the practical solution proffered
by these “One Week Secretaries”, there’s a psychological boost, at least
according to other media reports. Not to the residents only, but to the
party rank-and-file participating.The
purpose is “to achieve a degree of regularization, enhance the sense of
responsibility on the part of party members, and to provide a sense of
belonging [to the local constituency].” In short, the program also imparts
meaning and mission--primarily to older cadres, to be sure, but the lesson is clear for other officials whose neglect of their main job has led to the program to start with.

The media reports of success with this project
are recent; they likely reflect pressure
from at least the provincial level (and very possibly above) to justify the
initiative.It’s also likely that some
of its sponsors would like to see the project extended and expanded, to include other
areas of Jiangsu or beyond. And there may be other officials at higher levels who would like
to see the same experiment applied to younger cadres because it seems to be working.

At the same time, this is a project that
illuminates the challenges that government officials confront in trying to address
local concerns: Younger cadres seem to
be looking more at promotion than policy; villagers feel neglected; and it’s
left primarily to the old guard cadres to act because they’re not playing much
of a role anyway. The “One Week
Secretary” program is intriguing in conception and application, yet it’s also disquieting. For it’s clearly not only the constituents who
are unsettled, but also the local cadres who are supposed to be governing
them.